We have a complete (one-hour long) video of the tutorial presented by Arun Kumar, CEO of Kerika, at the recent Lean Transformation Conference on the subject of Kanban vs Scrum: what’s the difference, and which should you use?

This conference is all about Lean and Agile in the public sector: thousands of folks from state, county and local (city) government agencies will be attending, and as usual Kerika will also have a display booth on the 5th floor of the Tacoma Convention Center.

Arun’s topic this year is “Can You See It Now? Visualizing your Lean and Agile Workflows”.

We look forward to seeing our Washington users at the conference; please do stop by our booth or sign up for Arun’s talk!

We used to have Export as HTML and Export as CSV as options for our Task Boards and Scrum Boards, and with our latest version we are tweaking the Export as CSV to become Export as Excel instead.

There are a couple of reasons we did this:

We now include chat and document links in the export: this was done specifically to help our many government users who need to respond quickly to Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
(See our separate post on how Kerika makes FOIA-compliance one-click easy.)

Everyone who uses the CSV export wants the data to end up in an Excel file anyway, so why not put it in that format to start with? (After all, it’s easy to go the other way as well, from Excel to CSV…)

(And, if you work for a governmental organization anywhere in the European Union, that’s going to be true for you as well.)

Kerika makes it one-click easy for you to meet you disclosure requirements, thanks to the Archive and Export feature:

Archiving freezes a project, presumably in it’s “done” state: everyone who used to have access to the project still does, but all cards, canvases and documents associated with that project are made read-only.

This means that you now have a pretty good record for what a project looked like when it was completed: what work was done, by whom, and which documents were used and what conversations took place.

And the kind of integrated, comprehensive view of a done project is something that you can get only from Kerika: the old mix of SharePoint and Project and regular email just doesn’t work!

Exporting is the other piece of the disclosure puzzle: with just one mouse click, you can export all (or some) of the cards in a board, in CSV or HTML format.

Exporting in HTML is particularly helpful when meeting disclosure requests because the HTML output can be easily edited, using Microsoft Word for example, to take out items that need to be redacted for security or privacy reasons.

That’s the difference with a modern project management and team collaboration software like Kerika: the worst part of your government job just became one-click easy.